I do not think technology will lessen the impact of genius or diminish the value of our cultural predecessors. On the contrary, the force of the creative visionary will multiply. Connoisseurship was for the few people trying to understand the very best through direct experience. Now people will learn these values a different way. Contemplating a digital image of a work of art may have more value than going to a “blockbuster” and seeing 300 works by an artist in a single day with 20,000 other people. Artists, writers. poets and musicians aren’t just cultural craftsmen, clumping through time turning out workmen-like “stuff.“

If culture was simply cookoo clocks it never would have survived for thousands of years and societies would not have invested it with such importance. Vision comes from some place, passes through the world, leaves and is found somewhere else again. It will always amaze us wherever it appears and society will always covet the flotsam and jetsam it leaves behind.